Darkside
by displacerghost
Summary: Maybe they're right, maybe she is a monster. But maybe that isn't wrong. Maybe there are some things you can only learn once you've let go of the light. (Star Wars AU. Sith Roxanne, Jedi Megamind. Emotionally dark)


_when it gets dark enough you can see the stars_

 **dissolved girl**

nobody's daughter she never was, she never will

be beholden to anyone she cannot kill

down at the bottom of the ocean i lay down

nobody's coming, just continue to drown  
and no one here could ever stop my ruin now

it's glorious, its terrible; god i need it  
it's beautiful it's ravenous; i'll just feed it  
coil down to your black dark decay

and i will dig my own grave now  
i'm misbegotten  
i am the last one you save here  
it's all gone rotten

asphyxiate all your pain away  
don't try to win it will only end in disgrace

\- Nobody's Daughter, Hole

* * *

There is darkness inside of her.

She is eight years old the first time it happens and every light for an entire block flickers, then shatters. Darkness falls.

No. That's not quite right.

Darkness was here the whole time.

* * *

She was never good, oh no, it was far too late for that. Eight years old and she'd absorbed enough of her mother's twisted version of hatred and her father's willing indifference and her brother's careless perfection to last a lifetime.

They didn't even knowit was her. They should have. But they never cared enough to look close enough and see.

Invisible girl, until she opened her mouth. Until she laughed too loud, until she skinned her knees climbing the big tree outside her bedroom window, until she made a face at Danny over dinner. Until _no running indoors, Roxanne! Speak more softly, Roxanne. Don't argue with your father, Roxanne, don't talk back don't use that kind of language in my house don't disrespect your mother don't listen to that filthy music don't talk to boys they only want one thing don't don't_ _ **don't**_ _–_

Don't be _Roxanne_ , Roxanne. Be soft and sweet and gentle; be good.

Invisible girl, until she did something _bad_.

Is it any wonder what lesson she learned?

* * *

There are no Jedi to test her, not out here, not on the edge of the map.

Maybe that would have saved her.

Maybe it would only have been another kind of prison.

* * *

The other children dislike her, of course, but for far more normal reasons. She is bossy. Headstrong—that's one of the words adults use when what they really mean is _bad_.

She is mean, too—only, she doesn't mean to be. Roxanne isn't sure what will be mean when it comes out of her mouth, she's really only trying to talk to them, to connect, to be friends. Sometimes she feels like she doesn't even speak the same language they do, like there's some secret code everyone else in the galaxy knows and she was left out and no matter how hard she tries no one will tell her how to do it. How to fit in. How to be...normal.

How to be good.

Being good in the way her mother means feels like dying, it feels like she's nothing but a mask over a raw bloody ruin and she is _so angry_ without ever quite understanding why.

Shouldn't she _want_ to be good?

She's too smart, as well, and the teachers don't like being corrected and the other students get mad that she always has the answers and always disrupts class by asking the wrong kinds of questions and eventually her parents pull her from school and eventually find a tutor, instead, and in the meantime Roxanne is bombarded with _So much trouble!_ and _Do you have any idea how_ expensive _this is?_ and _Why can't you just be_ good.

 _Good_.

Like a nail in a coffin. Oh, how she _hates_ that word.

What they're telling her to do is _be good_ but what it feels like, following their rules and smashing all the pieces of herself that won't fit in their eyes and never shouting and never running and never laughing—

What it feels like is betrayal.

"Because it is," says her tutor, when she screams all of this him, trying to break his furiously unflappable calm and make him _go away_.

Roxanne lowers her arms and stands panting for breath in the middle of the mess she's made of the room, the broken chairs and toppled table and shattered glass.

" _What?_ "

His eyes flick up to her face, and then over the wreckage of the room. "You can do better than this," he says, and then looks at her again and tilts his head and asks, sounding mildly curious, "Why are you holding back?"

And suddenly she _knows_ he doesn't mean the lessons, the stupid course work that, in this suspended moment, seems so much like playing pretend.

The world is a painting; a mask. A glass window with the light slanted _just._ _so_.

And behind it all as she has known her whole life—is the waiting dark.

"Because it's... _bad_ ," she whispers, and now he _smiles_ at her, now the mask falls away and he looks at her with his real eyes and he _sees_ her, like no one in her whole life has ever bothered to, and he says—

"What's wrong with that?"

* * *

The lure of the Dark side is this: _what if._

What if instead of broken, you could be beautiful.

What if you could trade your chains for power.

What if you didn't have to _hurt_.

* * *

She does not leave them a note when she goes.

They never really knew she was there anyway.

* * *

"You cannot be what they want," he tells her. "And you will only beat yourself bloody trying."

Roxanne has always known the truth of this. But she'd never known any other way existed.

"So don't try. They call you a monster? Yes, and so you are—but what do you know of _monsters,_ Roxanne?"

"They're something to be afraid of," she answers, trying to speak a truth she knows.

She is rewarded with a smile. He seldom smiles, and it never reaches his eyes, but she always feels a clench of satisfaction when he does.

Because it means he is proud of her.

He leans down until they are face to face. His eyes are large,and so very dark. In a voice just above a whisper her Master says, "They are powerful."

* * *

He says _power_ but what Roxanne learns he means is _freedom_.

Power means you don't have to let people hurt you—you can hurt them first.

It turns out she is very powerful. Her Master is pleased.

"You have a lot of anger," he says, and she feels it ripple inside of her. He is watching her closely. "They did you a favor," he says. "Though you should not thank them for it."

"A favor," Roxanne says, and pushes her sweaty hair away from her eyes, lowering her lightsaber. She is watching him carefully as she does, because she knows he will strike if she lowers her guard.

"Oh, yes indeed," he says. "You are angry because they hurt you, when they should have loved you."

Roxanne would have shrugged, to show her indifference, but then he would leap at her. And her Master does not soften his blows. He is driving for a point—he often combines painful self-examination with saber lessons.

He is trying to distract her, yes—but he is also trying to _hurt_ her. To give her more power.

She hates it, which only makes him glad, which infuriates her even more, and until she—

He moves, like oiled smoke, so smooth and swift her eyes can hardly track it.

Which is the point— _use the Force._

Her blade slams into his when his saber would have taken her head off. The acrid reek of burned hair stings her nostrils—he'd come very close. The hum pulses trough her teeth, her bones.

He disengages, steps back. They circle one another.

"You have been training alone," he says, not bothering to conceal the surprise in his tone.

Roxanne, with her eyes locked on his and her Force-sense wide open, smiles at him. He has told her to only practice under his supervision.

"They hurt me because they were stupid," she says, answering his earlier statement. There is a flicker, through his eyes. It is not like her to ignore a direct challenge—

And she moves, not only with the lightsaber, closing the space between them in a few swift strides, but also striking out through the Force. Crimson colored lightning cracks outward from her open palm and her Master's lightsaber flashes in a circle, knocking it aside before the blast hits his chest and while his guard is wide open Roxanne slams her shoulder into his sternum and hooks his feet out from beneath him.

His saber catches hers, before the red beam touches him. But he is looking up at her from behind their crossed blades and he is on his knees before her.

Inside of herself, rising like a tidal wave, she feels—she feels—

Her Master sneers, mouth twisting with ugly emotion, face cast blood-red in the glow of their blades.

"This doesn't mean anything," he says, and the mild mask is cracked wide open and for the first time she sees the ugly truth beneath.

Her voice sounds very far away to her own ears as Roxanne answers, "This means everything."

* * *

Later, alone, she cuts her hair, being very careful to match the new length to the seared strands.

 _No one_ will ever come that close her ever again.

No one.

* * *

In this school she is the only student.

She does not sit on the sidelines. She does not face ridicule when she already knows the answers. She does not have to break herself on _good_.

But she still asks all the wrong questions.

And, as it turns out, she is not the right kind of _bad_ , either.

* * *

The most prominent of her wrong questions is, "Why."

Roxanne is standing over the console that will release the docking clamps and void the cargo into space. There is a body, at her feet. It is still breathing.

Over the comm in her ear, her Master sighs. He never tells her _Because I said so_ but she often hears it in his voice anyway.

"Aside from the fact that we are getting paid to ensure no witnesses survive this attack, Roxanne, their pain will feed your power."

She's staring in at the people crammed into the cargo hold as she again speaks into her comm. "It's your name on the contract, Master."

A scoff. He sounds almost impressed. "Are you angling for a bigger bite?"

...She doesn't know what she's angling for. Where this is coming from.

The Force pulses through her, deep, interminable.

Silent.

Roxanne does not vent the cargo.

Roxanne hacks into her Master's ship's systems and transfers every last credit to the cargo, and when they've passed out of sensor range on the scanners she erases the flight path from the ship's systems.

He is _livid_.

But...

So is she.

 _No one orders me around, no one CONTROLS me_.

Isn't that what he's taught her?

And this is, after all, how things go between a Sith apprentice and her Master.

In the end he is a broken, bloody mess on the floor at her feet with the tip of her blade over his heart. Holding his gaze, breathing hard, teeth bared in a snarl, she extends her other hand and the hilt of his saber rattles on the floor—his eyes narrow, face a twisted rictus of rage—then the metal, still warm from his grasp, slams into her palm.

Roxanne clenches her fist around it, and when she opens her fingers the fragments of steel and circuitry and crystal fall to the floor.

"You aren't _worth_ killing," she says, spitting onto the broken shards of his saber crystal.

Instead, she takes all his stuff. And his ship.

It seems like the right kind of bad thing to do.

* * *

She does kill, when it suits her needs. She paints a path of blood across the stars, and if she demands of herself that there be _cause_ for death—well, what of it?

It suits her needs.

Needs like _don't fucking touch me_ are enough to tear a man's head off, yes? Needs like, _this is a nice world, I think I'll stay here a while_ are enough to abolish slavery and reinstate proper government—she doesn't want to _rule_ a world, politics are not her kind of power, and slavery is messy and inefficient.

(There is nothing inside that whispers, it is _wrong,_ there is _nothing_ —)

That particular venture led to eradicating slavery in an entire quadrant, largely because once she'd done it on the pleasure planet she'd wanted to settle on, the warlords on nearby worlds got _nervy_ and attacked her and—well. It was almost funny, wasn't it? Attacking _her?_ She'd have felt sorry for them if they hadn't ruined her vacation plans. And hunting down the ringleaders turned out to be so much _work_ that it was only fair, Roxanne thought, that she destroy their legacy in revenge.

Her heart whispered _let them burn_. So she did.

That was the first time the Jedi council sent one of their order after her. Roxanne tore the woman apart.

She didn't mean to—she thought Jedi would be _strong_. But fighting this twi'lek was like fighting a paper-warrior, and the idiot _wouldn't fucking stop_.

She does feel very strange, after, staring down at the broken body. She can't see what other choice she'd had, but it makes her sick.

Her Master had been right. She isn't a very good Sith.

After that, she looks into measures for _restraining_ a Jedi, and the next time the council sent someone against her, Roxanne sends him right back.

In a stasis box.

With the words _FUCK OFF_ burned into the cover.

Imagining the council's faces when he finally arrived makes her feel warm and fuzzy inside.

She's not invisible girl anymore.

It's just...

Nothing is _enough_. None of it makes her happy.

Although happy isn't even the word for what she's seeking. Satisfaction would probably be closer but even that is a _positive_ and she's not looking for positive but rather a cessation of the negative. There's a dead star inside her soul and what Roxanne wants is whatever _thing_ can stop it from devouring her.

Why, why bother, why try. Why keep going.

 _What_ is the fucking _point._

There isn't one. There never has been. Life is a joke, a bitter stupid joke and the only point anyone's ever found is pain. How much can you _hurt_.

She is not interested in plumbing that well. She's done it for years and still can't find bottom.

There is no reason to stop, but there's no reason to keep going either.

And then she finds one.

Or rather, it is taken from her.

* * *

Her Master had a star chart, from some dead world, showing stars no one has ever heard of.

It is now _Roxanne's_ useless star chart, one of many unknown and thus superfluous items acquired from her Master.

Or it was hers, anyway.

Until it was stolen by a _bounty hunter_ , of all fucking things, some human trash calling himself Titan. A reject from the Jedi Academy, who had whined and begged and annoyed his way into her tolerant graces long enough to get a ride on her ship. _Just to the next planet, that's all, then I'll be out of your hair forever Roxie_ —

His body slams into the side of the hull and Titan claws frantically at the invisible hands denting his throat. Roxanne waits until his face starts to go purple and his eyes bulge before she lets go, and he falls heavily to the deck, the sound echoing as he gasps and sputters.

"Don't call me Roxie," she says. Mildly.

"Gah—yeah, you—you got it."

She should have just smashed his thieving ass through the hull.

When she arrives at his planet and discovers he has _not_ been cowering in his room, like she'd thought, but has vanished and taken the star chart with him, Roxanne's rage is so great she feels like she can almost _reach him_ even though he's probably parsecs away by now. Her ship shudders and groans around her, lights flickering, and Roxanne forces herself to calm down, breathing through her teeth and clenching her fists so hard blood trickles from her hands.

So now she has a purpose, thanks so fucking much _Titan_.

She is going to find him and rip him limb from limb.

* * *

Roxanne tracks him to a mining station, long abandoned, on the fringes of charted space. He is not, she has learned in the months she's hunted him, very _intelligent_. At all. While this makes him easier to follow, it is very _bad_ for her self-confidence.

The station still has artificial gravity and life-support, at least.

The thief is obviously _meeting_ someone here. She scanned for other ships when she docked, both with her ship's sensors and with her Force sense. Nothing came up, but...it was big station.

She finds him, though. She could've tracked his stench through a bantha herd.

Roxanne keeps her distance, though, because something about this doesn't sit right. She wraps the shadows around her, keeping pace with him. Follows him into a big, open room. Titan takes a staircase down and she trails silently along the balcony, watching to see which way he goes. Once he vanishes through a door in the far wall, she ducks below the edge of the railing and lets herself drop, preparing to roll the second she hits the ground—no need to waste the Force on this—

She never even hears him coming.

He falls on her in the air, the whole solid weight of him directed into his boots as they slam into the bottom of her ribcage. Roxanne hits the ground on her back and doesn't have any air left to lose—

She pulls it into her lungs by Force, and flips onto her feet while he is drawing his lightsaber. Jedi. _Real_ Jedi. She can taste it on him before the blue beam of his blade extends, and she doesn't waste a single second.

He tries to say something but the sound is lost in the rush of blood in her ears and the thunder in her heart and she's on him like a storm, the heavy force of her blade sliding along the length of his with a high whine that hurts her teeth. Green eyes meet hers over the crossed beams and she bares her teeth at him and shoves away, whirling around to strike again and bringing up her off hand with a fistful of lightning crackling between her fingers.

Only he's not there, the little shit has danced away and her lightning falls apart in a tangle of crimson ribbons when he slashes his lightsaber through the center of it.

Now her teeth are bared in a grin, and she strides towards him, unstoppable, relentless, breathing hard as the joy of battle floods through her. "Oh, you're _fun_."

Consternation flickers over his expression but she doesn't give him any time for it and _leaps_ at him. He's some kind of species she's never seen or heard of—oversized head and miles of lovely blue skin and big green eyes so vivid they're almost as luminous as the lightsabers.

He matches her, blow for blow, like no one ever has. He is _annoyingly_ fast, and—

And she's _losing._

It's like he's reading her mind, like she's shouting all her moves to him—

Blue crashes against red, and this time _he's_ the one grinning on the other side of the blades.

They shove apart, circling again. Roxanne blinks sweat out of her eyes, grinding her teeth and channeling the painful burn of overexerted muscles into her power. Fuck, is it possible he's _that_ Force sensitive?

 _Maybe it is_ , she thinks, _maybe that's what the big blue head is for_ —

She sends her senses one way, in the Force, rippling through the currents of power, and follows that with her lightsaber which he blocks, sparks showering around them.

But there's nothing in the Force to prepare him for her fist slamming into his jaw, or her knee in his groin as he crumples to the floor. She brings her knee up again, and this time it cracks under his chin as she combines it with a fist to the front of his head. There is a choking cough, almost like he's about to be sick, but then the force of her knee and gravity take over and he's lying flat on his back, spread-eagle on the floor, huge green eyes locking on hers as Roxanne brings her boot down on his hand, kicking away the dead hilt of his lightsaber before flattening his wrist under her heel.

She could press down, if she liked, and break every delicate bone. The knowledge of this flickers through his eyes. The fear of it.

She does not press down.

She smiles, holding her blade to his throat.

"Why are you here, Jedi?"

* * *

Notes: the italicized quote at the beginning about stars is Ralph Waldo Emerson.

I _LOVE_ Evil Roxanne. I really really _really_ super do. I had the thought a while back of giving movie-verse her dark powers but it was only half an idea, then on tumblr we all started talking about Sith Roxanne and my brain went _ooooh_. Then someone was really horrible to me today irl and I just...poured my own dark side into this.


End file.
